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Happy International Women’s Day!

We’re delighted to share with you our top picks of inspiring, visionary female authors of fiction and non-fiction from the blog. Click on the cover to see full review. Happy International Women’s Day!

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World Book Day – If you read one book this year, let it be…

…Milkman by Anna Burns, the 2018 Man Booker Prize winner. First of all, don’t get turned off by the subject matter – the conflict in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. Sure, it’s serious stuff, but the way it’s presented here, makes it far from dreary. In fact, it’s one of the funniest books I read over the past year. It requires a bit of effort this book – it’s written in a stream-of-conciousness style, with no names – but is all the more rewarding for it. This book made me laugh of loud and  admire some truly original, inspiring fiction writing. Go for it!

Read full review of Milkman here.

The Shardlake Series by CJ Samson

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The Shardlake Series

Page-turning series featuring a 16th century detective

Set in Tudor England, The Shardlake Series by CJ Sansom is a series of (currently) 7 books featuring the lawyer Matthew Shardlake and a cast of both real and fictional characters. Packed with mystery, murder and intrigue and a wealth of fascinating historical insights, I admit I have become a bit obsessed. Forget taxing literary fiction, here is your new guilty pleasure.

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Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima

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Territory of Light

A quietly powerful story of separation

Our nameless narrator’s husband has just announced he is leaving her. Adrift with a three-year old daughter she attempts to rebuild a life, but 1970s Japan is an unforgiving place for divorced women and shame, sadness and responsibility weigh heavily on her. Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima is a strange little book; its quietly powerful, sparse language perfectly captures despair and isolation in the wake of separation.

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The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es

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The Cut Out Girl

An astonishing piece of multi-layered historical writing

Bart van Es grew up with the knowledge that his grandparents had sheltered a young Jewish girl in the Netherlands during the war. As a middle-aged Oxford don he decides the time has come to find out more. This Costa Book of the Year winning book is the result: a remarkable blend of family history, wartime record and investigative journalism, where the secrets and lies of a family and a country are unearthed. The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es is an astonishing piece of multi-layered historical writing in which we make the author’s discoveries alongside him, where artefacts and public records are examined alongside an old lady’s memories, and in which we learn anew about both the horrors and the sacrifices that humans are capable of.

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Autofiction – what is it?

Writing about lived experience is nothing new, and yet there has been a recent surge of books that blend aspects of the memoir with elements borrowed from fiction. Examples of such literature, coined ‘autofiction’ by the French writer Serge Dubrovsky, have proved to be highly readable, genre-bending accounts of the author’s life’. Autofiction can also be used to describe autobiographical fiction, a fictionalised narrative that draws on the author’s life and experience, and fictionalised autobiography, which is modelled more closely on real life with some compressed or fictionalised events or characters.

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Educated by Tara Westover

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Educated

Prepare to laugh, cry, cringe and gasp at this fierce love letter from a daughter to her parents

Tara Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a deeply dysfunctional Mormon family. Her fanatical father believed the End of Days was fast approaching, so she and her six older siblings spent every summer bottling hundreds of peaches and every winter rotating emergency supplies in the belief that when the end came her family would survive. Prevented by her parents from attending school, Tara has no birth certificate. She also has no medical records, due to her authoritarian father’s extreme aversion to hospitals and doctors of any kind. As far as the state is concerned, she doesn’t exist. Educated by Tara Westover is the remarkable story of her struggle for self-invention.

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Learn to love yourself this Valentine

Can you properly love someone without first learning to love yourself? I don’t think so. So what better time to start than this Valentine. As you would expect, I’m a great believer in books helping us find the right kind of self-love and have made a selection for The Wildsmith Papers. Curious? Go find out.

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

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Bad Blood

A peek into the dark corners of Silicon Valley

Twenty-one-year-old Stanford drop-out Elizabeth Holmes had a game changing idea for the health care industry, a steely determination and seductive powers of persuasion; she also had an execution problem and questionable ethics. In Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist at The Wall Street Journal, we get the shocking story of Theranos, the largest health care start-up fraud in recent history. A page turning real-life thriller.

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